ملکوت و جنت

by Giorgio Agamben, ابراهیم رنجبر (Translator)

وقتی به زندگی هر روز خود نگاه می‌کنیم، تو گویی تمامی این اعمال و تصمیمها منوط به وقوع آینده‌‌ای روشن است. انگار ما تصوری آرمانی از وضع خوب یا خوشبختی در ذهن داریم، ولی این تصویر باشکوه اکنون دور از ماست و در آینده‌‌ای دور یا نزدیک به آن خواهیم رسید. به همین سبب، تلاش می‌کنیم زندگی ما معطوف به همان آینده قطعی ولی نامتحقق باشد. گویی ما گذشته‌‌ای رو به آینده را در اکنون خود زندگی می‌کنیم. کتاب ملکوت و جنت تلاشی برای واکاوی و ساخت گشایی همین تصور است. آگامبن ما را با خود به عمیق تاریخ اندیشه می‌برد، آنقدر به جنبه‌های مختلف این تصور می‌پردازد تا به مرور دلالت‌های سیاسی و اجتماعی و هستی شناختی این تصویر باشکوه و آرمانی را بازشناسیم و بپرسیم که آیا آدم هرگز در بهشت بوده است؟

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Religion, Theory, Italy

176 pages, Paperback

First published April 18, 2019

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[Hanieh Sadat Shobeiri]

نمی‌دونم چه واکنش شیمیایی‌ای توی مغز مترجم اتفاق افتاده که باعث شده بود تصمیم بگیره جملات لاتینی که نویسنده بهش رفرنس داده بود رو با تلفظ فارسی کنار معنیش بنویسه! این حرکتش انقدر خوندن کتاب رو سخت و روند خوندنش رو اعصاب‌خوردکن کرده بود که نمی‌تونم توصیف کنم!

مثلاً:
پردیس زمینی حاصلخیز است، یعنی نفسی پرثمر که در عدن کاشته شده و معنای آن لذت است. اِست ارگو پارادیسوس تراکوایدام فِرتله، هوک اِست آنیما فوئکوندا، این دِن پلانتا.

یا اینو ببینید که چطوری این تلفظ‌ها رو دقیقاً وسط جمله می‌آره، جوری که جمله قطع میشه و تمرکز مخاطب موقع خوندنش از بین می‌ره:
بنابراین آدمی یا به خاطر انتظار حیاتی واپسین یا زندگی در این زندگی سایه‌گون ما در زمین (اومبرا اِست هایک کوآی نونک نوسترا اِست ویتا این ترا) در سایه می‌زیست یا در نوعی ضمان زندگی (این کوئودام پیگنوره ویتای) قرار داشت.

دقیقاً قصد مترجم چی بوده این جا؟ راحت‌تر کردن مطالعه؟
یعنی مترجم احتمال اینو نداده که مخاطب همچنین کتابی قطعاً یه چیزی از الفبای لاتین حالیش می‌شده و اصلاً نیازی به تلفظ فارسی نداره؟ خیلی منطقی‌تر نبود که رفرنس می‌زد و لاتینش رو پایین صفحه می‌نوشت؟
این می‌تونست برای منِ مخاطب فارسی‌زبان، یه تجربه‌ی جذاب در حد سه ستاره باشه ولی خب من به شخصه نتونستم کتاب رو تموم کنم.
حیف.

[Kimia]

راهنمای تفکر و سنجش و قضاوت شخصی هرگونه خلاء فکری در زمینه رستگاری

[Morabito]

El libro es bueno. Agamben es un pensador muy bueno e incisivo. Desgraciadamente este libro tiene muchísimas citas en latín que el traductor (o Agamben, o el editor de esta edición) no se tomó el tiempo de traducir. Yo entiendo que muchos libros que utilizan la filología como lo hace aquí Agamben, nunca traducen, pero tomando en cuenta que esta editorial en general es de divulgación y no para especialistas, me parece un gran error no hacerlo. En todo caso, debido a esto la lectura se hace tediosa y se entorpece. Asimismo, queda advertido el lector, que no es un libro fácil y que se da por sentado bastante conocimiento sobre discusiones teológicas entre San Agustín, Erígena, Tomás y otros pensadores.

[AlbertRC]

Les poques coses que he pogut comprendre m'han semblat interessant. Tanmateix, he sigut incapaç de seguir gran part del treball d'Agamben. Necessites uns coneixements sòlids de teologia, i no és el meu cas. Penso que l'autor tampoc ho posa gens fàcil.

[michal k-c]

so man has never actually been in prelapsarian paradise. so what. i've never been to Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville in Las Vegas Nevada. i assume these types of locales are the reason for differentiating between paradise and earthly paradise

[Luis Agustín Txanpongile Münasteriotar]

No es una paja mental, cosa que se agradece y que no va de suyo cuando se trata de Agamben. Nada de umbrales ni de aporías constitutivas de la política de occidente. Pura teología, como un puñetazo en la tripa.

[Radu-andrei Oarcea]

Agamben and Conceptual Necromancy
A Quaestio on Political Theology

Giorgio Agamben’s atheist reconstruction of political theology proceeds genealogically, concepts drawn from distant theological traditions are reassembled within a new architecture of power. The result is brilliant and provocative. Yet the procedure raises a question about the ontological and teleological status of the concepts it conjures. My argumentation unfolds in a way not unlike a medieval quaestio, confronting Agamben’s illustrative "ontology” with the theological and political conjectures they affirm.

Agamben exhumates patristic concepts, renders them ontologically inoperative, and transforms them into procedural non-sequitur tokens, much for the delight of pedantic textualism. The genealogy often presents hidden continuity as explanation, allowing distant epochs to appear as if they converged upon a single mechanism of government. Parallelism becomes the guise of insight, with sovereignty, administration, exception, and rule arranged into a bipolar structure repeating across centuries. Interestingly enough, for Agamben, exceptions make more than a rule.

A scholarly reading of Agamben observes that, particularly in Opus Dei, his analysis of officium and liturgy centres on the separation of the person from the function he performs, through which he traces the genealogy of function and government. His entire project can be deciphered through this enchanted keystone, which turns historical analysis into “genealogical evidence” for these operations. In his view, there is a separation between the office and the exercise of its function, and, at the level of political power, between sovereignty (legitimacy/ ontology/ transcendence) and governance (management/ economy/ immanence).

In The Kingdom and the Glory, this latter distinction takes the form of the articulation between Kingdom and Government. This distinction is genealogically traced by Agamben to oikonomia, which he reads as the theological paradigm through which the possibility of administration and governance apart from the sovereign unity of God becomes intelligible. This separation is manifested through a certain nakedness, as well as through a shroud that conceals its irreducible distinction. He uses the Christian iconography of Hetoimasia, the empty throne, as a metaphor for the "governmental machine" of the West. It symbolizes that the ultimate seat of power is vacant. As he puts it, "Doxology (glory) constitutes a threshold of indifference between politics and theology"; but just so, Agamben's analysis also comes to the conclusion that "Glory is the place where theology attempts to think the difficult conciliation between immanent trinity and economic trinity, theologia and oikonomia, being and praxis, God in himself and God for us".

Thus power needs glory, the immanent and economic Trinities are held as one and the same in the moment of doxology, of praise. Because there is nothing at the absolute centre of power, the machine requires rituals, ceremonies, and "glory", acclamations, media spectacles, to continuously mask and manage this central void. Glory, once the radiance of divine presence, becomes a device for administering and stabilizing power. Some readers therefore describe Agamben’s project as a form of “profane theology”. The theological vocabulary survives, but only as conceptual equipment. What remains is a hollow brilliance, the choreography of transcendence without transcendence itself. From a Christian perspective, however, this operation is necromantic. The divine spark of life is snuffed while the conceptual machinery continues to hum with eerie coherence.

In early Christian theology, particularly among the Cappadocians, for Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil the Great, oikonomia signifies the "dispensatio salutis", the historical self-communication of the Triune God through incarnation, redemption, and sanctification. Agamben treats this theological economy as genealogically continuous with, and structurally legible through, forms of bureaucratic management. Angels, in his reading, become an administrative hierarchy transmitting commands, and liturgical glory becomes the acclamation that stabilizes authority. The Trinity is transformed from the revelation of divine communion into an archetype of distributed governance and functional mediation. The two share a vocabulary but not an ontology. Confusing them produces a conceptual category mistake, where the drama of salvation is reduced to the diagram of a modern office.

Karl Schmitt famously argued that modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts. Sovereignty mirrors divine omnipotence, while the state of exception mirrors the miracle. Theology still possesses ontological weight and the possibility of divine interruption remains. For Agamben, the state of exception is no longer a juridical anomaly, a temporary suspension of order, but the hidden paradigm of modern governance itself which takes form as a historical ‘’gigantomachy’’, a space devoid of law. Inside this void, the law applies by ‘’not applying’’, allowing sovereign violence to act directly on human bodies, creating ‘’bare life’’ (homo sacer). For him, the dual structure of governance which typically relies upon the relationship between auctoritas and potentas, transforms the miracle into administration, and the economy of salvation becomes its management. Unlike Schmitt, Agamben does not juggle with ontological distinctions, he offers the machine without its pulse; or he transcribes the pulse, while denying the reality of the machine that produced the signal in the first place.

Where Schmitt understands modern political concepts as secularized theological forms, Karl Barth insists that theology begins not with human categories but with divine Revelation, that theological concepts are not emptied of their reference once they assume historical form; their meaning remains in identical ontological status with the reality to which they bear witness. Oikonomia, in this perspective, cannot simply be described as a paradigm of administration, because its meaning is inseparable from the self-communication of God in Christ.

Agamben interprets concepts primarily through their function within historical configurations of power rather than through their truth claims. The move appears to abolish metaphysics, yet metaphysics, and politics as choreography, quietly return through the back door as a philosophical decision. The reduction of ontology to function is itself a metaphysical choice, a metaphysics with ontology as pocket change. Agamben thus performs a kind of mirror-image spell, not unlike the much-maligned Marxian reduction of ideal structures to social relations.

Agamben’s sovereignly governed, yet deceptively restrictive theoretical framework of historical genealogy uses also Walter Benjamin's theological and political paradigmatic concept of the ‘’mesianic time’’ as a foreshadowing of his own state of exception; he uses it for its extractive political gain, as an anti-end of time, anti-ethical paralysis; a fortuitous break from the continuity of Christian teleological time and a push towards revolutionary action. Within this anti-linear, anti-traditionalist, notion of messianic time, one can find a political strategy that is not about awaiting a future saviour but about acting in the present, a time of "divestment" from the values of capitalist time and accumulation, leading to a standstill in the ongoing flow of historical injustices.

Agamben seeks to move beyond the entire ends-means opposition as the dominant framework for understanding political action. In The Coming Community, he defines politics as a sphere of ‘’pure mediality without end’’. Political action becomes significant when it exposes its own mediality rather than being subordinated to an external purpose. He touches on ‘’whatever singularity’’ (quodlibet), which represents a form of being that rejects fixed identity or social belonging, existing instead as a pure, exposed threshold or void. By occupying the void without allowing the state to capture or define it, humanity can achieve a "form-of-life" that is free from sovereign violence. Agamben points to the gesture as the ultimate embodiment of pure means. Situated between acting and intending, the gesture neither serves an external end nor becomes an end in itself, it is an expression of pure mediality. Pure means operate by releasing potentiality (dynamis), exposing and rendering the power machine inoperative (inoperosità), the only way to genuinely deactivate and depose sovereign power.

In theory, this yields a powerful diagnosis of modernity. In practice, it renders Agamben’s thought strangely gratuitous, incapable of intervention or ethical stake, remaining largely speculative, rather than enacted in the real world. It is telling that Agamben’s search for a “form-of-life” beyond sovereign capture leads him back, almost inevitably, into the theological vocabulary of kenosis. Agamben finds in this language a suggestive grammar for imagining a life no longer organized by sovereign command, retaining the gesture of self-emptying while leaving aside the rather inconvenient question of who is giving himself, to whom, and for what end.

By binding Glory to the Cross, Hans Urs von Balthasar does not turn divine power into mere weakness or defenselessness; he discloses a form of sovereignty whose very mode of being is self-giving love. For Balthasar, self-emptying is personal, relational, and teleological; the Son gives Himself to the Father, in the Spirit, for the reconciliation of the world. Divine fullness is therefore not the accumulation of power over the other, but the paradoxical freedom to give Himself without reserve. True divine Glory (doxa/Herrlichkeit) is not domination or the spectacle of omnipotence, but the radiant splendour of this Trinitarian self-giving. Kenosis is therefore neither a political technique nor a metaphor for governance, but belongs to the mystery of divine life itself, becoming visible in history through the person and mission of Christ.

His concepts - bare life, the state of exception - belong to what he calls political ontology. They are not sociological descriptions but philosophical diagnoses of the metaphysical structure of modernity. In this interpretation, his work attempts to chart a third path between nihilism and religious restoration, a radical disenchantment of the world. If one challenges the empirical claims, Agamben answers that the argument is ontological; if one challenges the ontology, he answers that it is merely genealogical, that he is only describing how concepts appear within history. The corresponding possibility of escape from this structure is articulated through concepts such as pure means, inoperativity, destituent power, and form-of-life, all of which point toward the deactivation of the political separation between zoē (mere biological life) and bios (politically qualified life).

The ambiguity of the system is captured in the image with which his reconstruction of political theology concludes. If the throne is full, glory answers the divine presence it celebrates. If the throne is empty, glory nevertheless sustains it through its managerial theological politics. The apparatus functions in either case. What emerges is an implicit ontology of the Void, a vision in which reality itself is gradually replaced by the operations that claim to govern it. The conceptual machine becomes suffocatingly coherent - Giorgio Agamben, the Necromancer Supreme.

But the price of this disenchantment is high. If the divine is reduced to symbolic representation, transcendence becomes merely another instrument within the machinery of power. The mechanism thus acquires a strange hermeneutical suspiciousness, it can testify only to the persistence of historical illusion; it represents the paradox of a hollowed out messianic condition that suspends the creative vocation of human beings. Here, action no longer unfolds within a triumphant or providential logic, nor according to the beautiful, the good, or the divine. What remains is a humanity inhabiting the final remnants of historical time, dwelling among the exhausted inheritances of a past whose conceptual promises have already been spent.

A cautionary reminder that even the most brilliant Necromancer, Nietzsche, could only offer his genealogy of morals and his lament over the exhaustion of culture and civilization. Democracy, stripped of glory, increasingly becomes an economy of proliferating claims, factions and popular banalities, where entitlement displaces virtue and every singularity becomes a demand upon the whole. The Other is increasingly encountered through suspicion, competition and resentment. When severed from its theological economy, sovereignty retains power without measure and seeks through violence what it has lost in transcendence.

Only God can be sovereign without danger, because His wisdom and justice are equal to His power. Human sovereignty cannot sustain itself as an absolute, nor can political virtue survive indefinitely without an economy beyond itself. If the patristic vision is correct, if oikonomia is not administration but the historical self-communication of the Triune life, then the apparatus is not the last word. The world is not merely governed, it is redeemed. And glory, in its true sense, is not the acclamation that sustains power, but the radiance of a presence that no apparatus can manufacture.

[Garrett Mikulka]

As I’ve said before, I think Agamben is an excellent interlocutor with the church. Here, he examines the Western Christian tradition’s understanding of the Garden of Eden and the implications it has for an understanding of human nature and, by extension, politics and society.

Agamben argues that Augustine’s doctrine of original sin forced the Church to understand the Garden as a place of the absolute past, never to be regained in its earthly form, placing salvation and resurrection in Heaven alone. As the argument goes, this emphasis on the cosmological diminishes the potential for hope and justice on earth.

As an alternative, Agamben turns towards Orthodox thinkers to give the earthly paradise more significance in political and social thought. Radically simplified, the Orthodox position Agamben explores places sin outside of human nature itself, recognizing it as an exodus from that nature rather than a part of it. Perfection, then, is the natural state of humanity (as opposed to a perfection that is defined as a natural or animal state that is then imbued with an additional grace) reflecting God’s nature. This argument pays off in understanding the Garden as not sanctioned in an absolute past but instead existing in Messianic time, an already-not-yet unrestricted by linear time.

Agamben goes further with this point through a discussion of Dante, though that section was admittedly the weakest.

Compared to other works I’ve read by Agamben, this one seemed less able to integrate theology and political philosophy, which I understand to be the express goal. I can imagine that being a disappointment for many readers, though I didn’t really mind, but I’ve always been more interested in the theological implications anyway. To that end, however, given that this was such a short book, one more chapter could have tied it all together in a more concrete way.

This was an interesting and unexpected complement to my current exploration of Orthodox theology. This book’s brevity puts it high on my recommended list.

[Viraj]

Fairly interesting but I haven’t read Dante

The book is a discussion of how we should consider the idea of the garden of Eden, as laid out in Genesis: is it something we as humans can return to and strive towards? Or is it something we’re doomed to be excluded from forever. Canonical catholicism claims the latter, but this began with some questionable reasoning from Augustine (which Agamben discusses in great detail), and the idea of Eden has been considered differently by other equally brilliant minds such as Eriugena and Dante.

Agamben wants to conclude that Augustine is a bit full of it, Eriugena and Dante are much more interesting, and that the Eden idea is something we can strive towards. And probably the idea of original sin is not really worth its salt (unless you’re trying to justify the necessity of baptism and the institution of the church).

I particularly enjoyed the first part of the book with its discussion of Augustine’s interpretation of the early bible and other works in order to make an argument for original sin— a feature of catholic christianity which (I wasn’t aware) didn’t exist prior to Augustine, and whose origins and motivations are deemed pretty suspect by Agamben.

Specifically, Agamben accuses Augustine of engaging in motivated reasoning, coming up with the necessity of original sin to justify the necessity of the institution of the Church and of the scrament of baptism. At some point Augustine flat out says that if there’s no original sin then Jesus died in vain. Augustine also begins to consider the story of the garden of Eden as a *literal place* rather than allegorical (as he did earlier in life). All this reads to me as pretty suspicious reasoning on Augustine’s part.

I’d also never heard of Eriugena prior (perhaps more out of my own lack of education than his actual obscurity), and was thoroughly fascinated to learn more about him.

I skimmed most of the parts on Dante since I haven’t read the Divine Comedy, sadly. Maybe I’ll get to that next.

[Elisa]

Se la natura umana umana può essere giusta, allora Cristo è morto invano (Agostino)
Agostino dice quasi che è nella natura umana essere peccatore, ma per non cadere nel manicheismo parla di "peccato" e non "natura". Ovviamente non può essere Dio a renderci cattivi.
Pelagio nega il peccato originale
Originale corruptio - > il peccato originale ne fornisce il pretesto
Per Agostino, con la grazia divina possiamo corrompere il peccato
Tommaso: un luogo in cui nessuno abita è inutile, ma dopo il peccato il paradiso non è più il luogo dell'abitazione umana. Dunque, se era il luogo più adatto all'abitazione umana, è stato istituuto da Dio invano.
Per Eriugena, il paradiso è la natura umana.
Sapienza e beatitudine sono connessi in Dante, a differenza di Tommaso.
Adamo ed Eva sono stati in paradiso per 6 ore.
Chiliasti identificano il regno terreno con il paradiso delle origini.

[Polak]

Magnífico ensayo sobre la felicidad del hombre en el mundo, partiendo de su inocencia en el Edén así como su origen en pecado, hasta llegar al advenimiento del reino expiatorio. Maravilloso recorrido por la teología adánica.

[Attasit Sittidumrong]

กล่าวตามตรง เล่มนี้ถือเป็นเล่มที่อ่านยากเล่มหนึ่งของผู้เขียน ที่บอกว่ายากนั้นไม่ใช่เพราะสไตล์การเขียน มากเท่ากับเนื้อหาเองซึ่งมุ่งเจาะลึกและตีความคำสอนทางเทววิทยาและการเมืองของคริศต์ศาสนายุคโบราณและมาจนถึงยุคกลางและยุคสมัยใหม่ ผ่านงานเขียนของนักเทววิทยา และนักเขียนหลายๆ คน การอ่านหนังสือเล่มนี้ให้เข้าใจจริงๆ จึงต้องมีความเข้าใจประเด็นทางคริสต์ศาสนา เทววิทยา ตลอดจนวรรณกรรมอิตาเลี่ยน มากพอสมควร อย่างไรก็ตาม แม้จะอ่านไม่ค่อยเข้าใจ แต่สิ่งหนึ่งที่เห็นได้ชัดเจนคือความเป็นนักนิรุกติศาสตร์และนักค้นคว้าทางประวัติศาสตร์ของอกัมเบนซึ่งทำได้อย่างน่าทึ่ง โดยเฉพาะการไล่เทียบคำศัพท์ข้ามภาษาในภาษาโบราณอย่างกรีกโบราณกับฮีบรูและอารบิก ถือได้ว่าแม้อาจอ่านงานของผู้เขียนไม่ค่อยรู้เรื่อง แต่ความไม่ค่อยรู้เรื่องนั้นก็มิได้บดบังความยอดเยี่ยมทางวิชาการของผู้เขียนแต่อย่างใด

[Andrés Serresiete]

El bueno de Agamben

[Graham Hoppstock]

I bought this for the cover, but it ended up being extremely good.

[Gustavo]

Es un poco , lento y aburrido.

[Santiago Aparicio]

Interesante estudio del reino y el paraíso cristianos.

[Valdemar Gomes]

Apesar de ser um tema aborrecido e do qual não tenho nenhum interesse, está bem explorado o tema. O que ao início era misterioso, muito cedo foi aborrecido mas foi conquistando terreno capítulo a capítulo.

[Michi Okahata]

The acceleration of technology in the last century is laden with theological significance. The relationship is straight-forward: energy : bomb :: automation : misalignment :: genesis : revelation. Celebration and critique, accounts of creation and catastrophe, converge on biblical analogy. Agamben's revision cautions against this common ground. Polemics that adopt the doctrine of original sin inherit a transcendent economy of salvation, only a god can save us now.

[j]

surprised it hasn't been fleshed out before. his reading of eriugena's plato places the animal category in a run against the aristotelian grain, which i thought was interesting. ill have to revisit the Dante with a friend later.